I first met Jon the year that I became an RA in the dorm he was living. I didn’t pay much attention to him because I grouped him in my “Engineer and thus socially inept” category; he didn’t pay much attention to me either but that’s because, in my opinion, he figured that I was out of his league. During Spring Break of that year we both went on a Habitat for Humanity service project in Connecticut where we got to know each other better. During that trip, I found out that his dad had died while he was in high school. For some reason that really affected me; I think it was because it showed me that there is a lot more to people than what you would initially expect.
Though we bumped into each other occasionally after that, we lost touch until the end of my first year of teaching at Holland Christian. Desperate to be “Deb” again and not “Miss Vriend,” I started spending more and more weekends in Grand Rapids with a group of college friends – Jon happened to be one of those friend.
We had our first “date” the night before I left for a month trip to the Middle East.I asked him out because I wanted to know if anything was up between us and I wanted to know before I left.We had a great time – and decided that once I got back, we would start “hanging out” more (I had issues with the semantics of the term “dating”).
A year later to the day, Jon proposed to me and we were married on the 27th of December.
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